Telecommunication network operators and service providers are currently implementing the internet protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS). IMS is a set of Internet Protocol (IP) standards for session-based control of multimedia and telephony services on any network type, including circuit switched networks, packet-switched networks, and the public switched telephone network (PSTN). IMS manages the communication, collaboration, and entertainment media over internet protocol. IMS enables users to access both content and other users in ways that are natural and intuitive.
IMS provides users with functionality that is not dependent on fixed or mobile networks and also retains existing protocols, including the session initiation protocol (SIP). The SIP is central to IMS. Originally developed for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), SIP enables multiple users to enter and exit at will an ongoing communications session (i.e. a connection between two or more communications terminals such as a mobile handset a content server, or a personal computer). Moreover, SIP enables users to add or remove media (voice, video, content, etc.) dynamically during a session and run multiple sessions in parallel.
IMS enabled services will include combinations of push-to-talk, click-to-dial, multi-player gaming, video telephony, SMS, dynamic push content, including file sharing, and video conferencing, and location-based commerce among other communication, collaboration, and entertainment services.
These services previously existed in independent silos: that is, users must exit one service (i.e., terminate a session) before they can access a new service (i.e., initiate a session). The routing, network location, addressing, and session management of IMS eliminates the walls of the silos to effect a so-called blended functionality that lets users move freely between networks and services while maintaining multiple concurrent sessions. In this way, IMS transforms a sequence of discrete communication events into a single shared communications environment.
For example, users will be able to select a communications mode (voice, voice with video, text-to-speech email, and so on) that best suits their circumstances while retaining the freedom to change that selection dynamically by adding a video stream midway through a voice call for example. Users will also be able to access familiar services on any device and via any network type, fixed or mobile. And they'll enjoy these freedoms along with new functionalities such as broader payment options, credit control presence management, and convenient connectivity to groups.
IMS also provides operators and service providers opportunities for cost reductions and revenue growth. They can expect cost reductions because IMS enabled services, unlike today's siloed services, do not require replication of every functionality: charging, routing, provisioning, and subscriber management, for example. Rather, IMS services can reuse the same functionality across all services, thereby accruing for their operators significant savings in capital and operational expenditures. Revenue growth through enabling enhanced services is IMS's other benefit. In this way, IMS is the panacea-in-waiting to communications and media companies, who face the threat of commoditization.
Telecommunication network Operators and service providers will need a convergent charging system to realize the value of IMS. Such a system—with its integrated view of the customer—is necessary to apply cross-service discounts on bundled offerings and other marketing promotions, as well as a single consolidated bill for each customer—even when services originate from multiple third-party providers.
Legacy billing applications have become increasingly inadequate to the demands of charging for IMS-enabled services as charging has undergone a profound transformation in recent years: from batch to real-time processing, from a back-office support function to a front-office mission-critical function, from a cost to be minimized to a strategic opportunity for revenue maximization.
Further, operators know that consumers have choices. In this environment, CSP's have difficulty remaining competitive if unable to maintain an uptime of at least 99.999%—so-called “five-nines” availability. Five-nines, which amounts to barely five minutes of downtime per year, is unprecedented in traditional billing.
As batch-processing systems, traditional billing vendors did not have to provide highly-available solutions. If the billing system failed during a batch run, the job could simply be restarted once the system became available. For this reason CSPs were forced to maintain separate systems to handle their prepaid and postpaid subscribers and services. Prepaid voice services were generally managed by the network equipment vendors, who traditionally provided prepaid solutions in the form of a service control point (SCP) or service node. These systems—built with the network in mind, especially prepaid voice—were designed to achieve the high-availability and low latency requirements of tier-1 service providers. However, this design focus, together with support for only very simple rating capabilities, resulted in these systems being much more restrictive than their postpaid counterparts.
Because no single system provided support for all the revenue management functions, CSPs have often had to deploy dozens of separate systems to support those functions. Different “stovepipe” systems managed prepaid and postpaid services, while still other systems managed services such as voice, data, content, and messaging. Such a multifarious environment has driven operational costs higher and hampered CSPs' ability to meet increasingly aggressive market requirements.
CSPs can no longer afford the operational excess of maintaining multiple systems: instead CSPs need a simple, convergent, and modular revenue management solution that delivers high performance and high availability as well as flexibility and scalability. The revenue management system must also meet the demands of consumer marketing-a complex function that increasingly entails bundled offerings, conditional multiservice discounts, highly segmented promotions, and revenue sharing across a multipartner value chain of content providers, service providers, and network operators.
Unlike telecommunications networks, which must route their transport (calls in circuit-switched networks and packets in packet-switched networks) in real time, legacy billing systems for telecommunications providers have customarily fulfilled a back-office function, batch processing records such as call detail records and IP detail records. If a billing system weren't available when scheduled to process a particular batch, engineers could fix the problem, then run the process a few hours behind schedule. In the worst-case scenario, customers' bills would arrive in their mail boxes a day or two later than usual. But new expectations of communications service users are now changing the rules of the billing game.
Today's users demand diverse payment options in line with their varied personal, business, and family needs.
Whereas some will continue to favor long-standing relationships in which they settle their accounts with operators in the traditional manner of postpayment via invoice, more and more users now require the freedom to prepay—perhaps by purchasing a prepaid card at a grocery store as credit towards service from potentially multiple CSPs over a period of time. Still other users want to pay for products and services as they consume them-so-called now-pay—by providing a debit- or credit-card number at the commencement of each transaction.
In the absence of a convergent real-time solution, CSPs have had to address the bang needs of their prepaid, postpaid, and now-pay customers by maintaining multiple, non-integrated billing and customer-care systems. Indeed, they've had no alternative because legacy billing systems were never designed to accommodate the transactional real-time requirements for prepay and now-pay services. And they certainly weren't built with the requisite low latency and five-nines availability that a revenue management system needs to process as many as several hundred million transactions per day in real time via a direct connection to the telecommunications network.
The absence of a billing system that could meet the high performance/low-latency and high-availability requirements for prepaid has imposed significant costs on CSPs since they were forced to maintain multiple separate systems for their prepaid/postpaid environments and services.